Day 18 - Great workout!

Wow I totally almost bailed on my workout today. I missed it this morning, let myself go back to sleep when I should have gotten up, then it was raining and I felt crappy (mentally) and wanted to get work over with so I didn't do it then. After work I had to fix dinner, etc and round about 8pm I was really looking for a further excuse not to do it, but I finally talked myself into just getting something done and what do you know? I ROCKED IT! I don't know if I am just getting more used to them or because I added weight and it felt good or what but this was my best workout thus far on the program. I remember when I used to love lifting and so far this month I have had to drag myself down there every day to do my workout and was glad when I was finished. Not that I wasn't glad tonight, because it was tiring, but glad in a proud way, not in a "that's finally over" way. Maybe I was just kind of going through the motions before or I am just getting more energy or something but I am glad for whatever it is. I added weight and it was fantastic! Yay me!
As far as nutrition goes, we still haven't had any further direction other than taking vitamins and fish oil, so I can say that I have been compliant with that. I have been trying to keep my carbs only after workouts, but since I didn't work out this morning and I didn't have anything else available for breakfast, I still had a whole wheat bagel. And with dinner I had a piece of wheat toast as well and that was before my workout. Well, I am eating good foods at least, no junk, and for now I'm not going to overthink it. It's a journey not a destination.
Mindset-wise, we had a really good article on the PN site today that I thought I would share a little about because it was kind of what I have been thinking about anyway but it really put it into a good format. Basically it said that usually when we decide we want to change, and we set goals, we focus on the following two things:
What "pleasure" will you get if you "do" get your goals?
What "pain" will you get if you "don't" get your goals?
Often the more motivating factor is the pain side because most people respond more quickly to pain stimulus than pleasure. But the flip side of the equation that we also must consider is this:
What "pain" will you get if you "do" get your goals?
What "pleasure" will get if you "don't" get your goals?
I thought that was really interesting, because a big thing for me is complacency and procrastination, and answering those second two questions really made me look those bad habits in the face. Hopefully it will help me to recognize when I am falling into destructive patterns in the future because I have considered ahead of time what will be calling to me from the "dark side" when it happens. Because for sure it will. I am now prepared. Hope you all are too!

Day 16 - Checking in

Well with everything else I am doing, updating my blog is going to have to be kind of low on the priority list. Getting in my workout and doing my nutrition habits are at the top so when I can get here I will but right now there isn't a lot to talk about. I failed to keep to anything this past weekend and I am disappointed in that, but my coach just encouraged me to put it behind me and concentrate on getting in the workouts on the weekends first. Right now nutrition is a bonus I think, since I am struggling right now. During the week I am fine, have been doing my workouts and finally got my fish oil in the mail yesterday so I am totally together with that. Need to get things going more smoothly in the morning, though. I was late for work yesterday. But I'll get it all together. Glad they are only giving things to us a little at a time because I would not be able to handle more with all that is going on in my life right now. Don't have a job after the end of the month and I don't know what I am going to do. Stupid economy. Anyway, I will worry about that when there is something I can do about it. For right now, I am applying everywhere I see a job, talking to people, and doing what I can to find something else, there isn't more I can think of to help. God is taking care of the rest I guess. Hopefully.

Day 11 - Starting the habit

Well I have done my workout every day this week so I am pretty proud of myself. It is crazy how we get ourselves out of and into habits. I hope that this time it becomes ingrained enough that it never leaves. I really hate the way my body looks and feels right now. But not much has been happening this week, so I'll just keep to my assignments and trust that change will come. The first nutrition habit we have is to start taking fish oil and a multi. I had to order that online so I haven't been able to apply that habit yet but will when I get the delivery! I am so happy to be taking this one step at a time, that it definitely what I have been doing wrong before. Hope all of you are doing well on your various journeys. Bye!

Day 9 - In the zone

Starting to feel like I am forming a habit of exercise again - YAY! Still have a long way to go but this one step at a time stuff really is what I needed. Past my bedtime now, don't have much else to say except that I hope I can start seeing progress soon. Those before pics are still haunting me...until tomorrow...

Day 8 – One step at a time

I was feeling great this morning, got back on the workout wagon and didn’t kill myself doing so today, but since lunch I have felt like total crapola. I don’t know what it is, I thought at first that I just needed to eat, but even after lunch it came back. Mainly it is a really bad headache, but I am feeling kind of lightheaded also and generally without energy. I don’t know what it is, but it needs to stop. Maybe I just need to go to bed early, but it better not be more than that because I need to get a regular schedule going with my workouts so I can make it a habit. The lesson for today was to make one small change at a time and only focus on that one thing, because if you try to change too much too fast you will fail. I agree with that a lot because that is what I usually do. I am really gung ho and then I burn out, getting overwhelmed. So it is impossible to do that for now because all we have to do is workout daily and check in on the message board. Wednesday we are getting our first nutrition habit, but for now I am happy to just work on getting my workout in since I am even struggling with that. But thankfully I already did it today because if I had not, I would have to skip it since I am feeling so bad. I have to remember that – work out when you can because you never know when something is going to interfere with your ability to do so later on. I guess that’s the reasoning behind doing morning workouts anyway. I am totally not a morning person, but I think morning workouts are best for me since I do get sidetracked. Like all this weekend. So anyway, that’s what happening for today. I hope this freakin headache goes away soon because it is driving me nuts. I just want to lie down in a dark cool room. Probably won’t get to do that but hopefully it will go away despite my going on with my day. Hope all is well with anyone else out there checking in. Have a lovely day.

Day 7 - Disappointed

Well I am pretty upset with myself because I didn't do any of my planned workouts yesterday or today. Time just got away from me, as it always seems to do on weekends. And my eating was atrocious. So I have a ways to go before I am going to be making any physical progress, that's for sure. I guess what I accomplished in the last week was just committing to the goal and starting the workouts, even though I only did half of the assigned ones. The upcoming week will be better. I am glad that they are only giving us things a little at a time because that has been my issue in the past, trying to implement too much at once. It is hard for me to go so slowly, but obviously I need it because new habits are extremely hard to ingrain. The coaches were talking about habits and were comparing daily habits like brushing your teeth and showering with getting into the daily habit of exercise, presumably that one day it will be automatic, you won't have to think about it. But to be honest, there are days when I don't feel like taking a shower and brushing my teeth and although I don't skip that more than one day, I do skip from time to time. So I guess that's okay if it is the same with exercise. Maybe the point is that it is more a habit to do it than to not do it and you don't want to go too long without it. I don't really know yet, it certainly isn't to that level with me yet, and in all the times that I have been in good shape, it hasn't gotten to that either. So we'll see if that changes. I am keeping an open mind, it's just obvious from the past few days that I still have very far to go. Nutrition habits start next week, too, so hopefully it will all start to click for me, because for some people they said it was like flipping a switch - they were immediately, completely on board with everything. But for me, it is still a constant struggle between the lazy depressed part of me and the wanting to get in shape side of me. Even with $10K on the line. You'd think that would be enough motivation, but I think these issues of mine go deeper than that. I'll have to work on them. We'll see. TTFN!

Day 5 - A little behind

Ha ha ha when I was typing the title of this entry I thought "wow, I never get to say that I have that"! I'm weird what can I say? Anyway, I am behind since it is technically Saturday and day 5 was yesterday but wanted to keep the update on the right day. I worked both jobs yesterday and then we had to have an intervention of sorts for my husband's best friend directly after I got home from work and it lasted until midnight, so I did not get my lower body workout in yet. I am going to do it today and do upper body tomorrow instead of having a rest day. So I basically just moved my rest day to Friday instead of Sunday. There's actually a chance that may become a regular thing because Fridays always seem to get away from me and Sundays are much slower. We'll see. So not much on the fitness front, a little sore from the upper body w/o on Thursday, but in a good way this time instead of an "I think I might curl up in a little ball and cry" way like the lower body. So I have gotten to a good set/rep/weight combo on some of my exercises at least. I was going to go buy a pull up bar Friday afternoon but that plan got blown out so I guess I do that early next week. Would like to have the proper equipment, and that is the last thing I need so far. So, that's about it for now. Shout out to my long-lost shredder friends who may check in on me from time to time, hope you are all doing well. See ya!

Day 4 - Finally recovering

Well I think that may well have been the worst case of DOMS I have ever had in my life, but it is finally fading away. I tried to massage some of it out last night and although I still had some trouble moving today, it was nothing compared to yesterday. Didn't have time to do my workout this morning, so I did it tonight, upper body today, and it was great. I am so glad to be back lifting. Still in the practice stages of this PN program, but I am so excited to be back a part of something with a supportive community behind me. I know how much that helps me. Weekends are my worst times, though, so I have to be extra vigilant to make sure I do my workout and not go crazy with food. But boy will it be worth it in the end. I have something really big planned when I get to the end of this contest, but I'm not going to share it just yet. But it will be much better if I win the contest as well, so I really have to work hard. Root for me! Be back tomorrow, I know you all can hardly believe I have actually been here 4 straight days. Miracle! Have a good night!

Day 3 – And again I say ow

Wow the amount of soreness I have right now is ludicrous. People at work think I have something seriously wrong with me. I dropped a packet of Splenda on the floor this morning and couldn’t bear to bend down and pick it up. I need to go to the handicapped bathroom so I have those bars on the sides to lower myself down slowly. Crazy! I obviously way overestimated my current strength level. Live and learn. What makes me mad though is that I don’t think I’ll be able to do today’s workout. I think I will try to just do some bodyweight things or at the very least stretching to help the soreness, but I for sure cannot do the number of sets and reps I attempted on Monday. Even without weight. I’m not going to stress about it, I have 6 months to get it right, and I don’t want to burn out early so I’ll just see how I feel. Otherwise, don’t have anything else we are supposed to do yet, so I am kind of floundering in what to focus on for the other 23 hours of my day. Food consumes much more of my thoughts than exercise so it’s hard to decide what I want to do until they tell me what they want. I haven’t really been doing well with food and I have so much conflicting info in my head I don’t know what to do. So I am just eating how I was before this, maybe a little better, but I am kind of also finishing up the stuff we have at the house because I hate to waste food. And money. Oh well… I do have a lot of veggies at the house because my sister and I enrolled in this thing called a CSA which is a share of a local organic farm that we pay for once a year and get to pick out from their crop for 20 weeks in the summer. So far it has mostly been lettuce and strawberries, but hopefully there will be more variety soon. If it doesn’t get better, we won’t do it next year, but for now I do get fresh veggies every Saturday so that’s cool. Need to have more salad before it goes bad! So that’s the story of today. Hopefully I can face tomorrow without feeling like I need a walker. See ya!

Day 2 – Ow ow ow ow

Yeah totally overdid it on the legs. Live and learn. That’s my punishment for quitting weights. Well, not quitting, just skipping about 365 workouts.  It has been almost exactly a year since my last real mission so it is a good time to get things back where they should have been. Today was upper body. Again just movement, 13 exercises, most of which I already knew, but took it easy with 3 sets of 3 each since I didn’t want to feel the same in my upper body as I do in my lower. For tomorrow I will lower the amount of sets and reps for lower body and raise it for upper body on Thursday. Right now that is the assignment for the week: lower MWF, upper TuThSa. Practice the movement. I will be getting additional upper body work as well since Jujitsu is tonight and we always do pushups. Unless I decide to make one of my students lead exercises since my legs may not function. Might be a good idea. Anyway, I am just getting back to daily blogging so I just want to keep up with it for now, nothing much earth-shattering going on. I posted yesterday’s message earlier since I didn’t have time yesterday and now I am all caught up. One thing I am struggling with right now is that they haven’t given us any direction on nutrition yet and that is what I need. I want my workouts to count so I don’t want to eat badly, but should I be doing the PN rules or something else? For now I am just watching my intake overall, avoiding sugar, and trying to add back the habit of drinking water. I have definitely been bad on that. By tomorrow I can ask questions and that will be what I want to know first. I also updated my sidebars and all for my new commitment, please keep me on track if anyone is out there. So otherwise, I’m just moving along in my day (slowly!). Have a good one!

Day One – again…

Was it inevitable that I would be starting over based on the title of this blog? I hope not. But boy do I regret stopping weights after my workout yesterday. I enrolled in the Precision Nutrition Lean Eating Program and the first assignment was…movement! It wasn’t even supposed to be exercise, just familiarizing yourself with the movements, but heck if it didn’t kick my entirely too large butt! Clearly I have lost a TON of lean muscle mass in the past year. I guess when I wasn’t losing “weight” I was still losing muscle and gaining fat. Yay me. I know better, but I don’t listen to myself. Anyway, we had 13 lower body exercised to do. We were supposed to do 5 sets of 5 each but I had to drop down to 3 sets of 3 each by the end because I wasn’t going to be able to finish if I didn’t. I was hardly using any weight, too! Sad when body weight alone is enough to make your legs feel like jello. So I could barely walk up the stairs when I was finished and will be really hurting tomorrow since typically DOMS shows up for me on the second day after a workout. But even so, I am very glad to be back in the gym. It took a long time for me to come around, but I had to do something. I miss how I used to look and feel so much.
Also, I took before pictures yesterday and they were disgusting. Seriously. I cannot believe I have let myself go that bad and didn’t even know I was so gross. So those pics will not be posted until I have some results to go with them. But for reference, they are worse than my original before pics. So horrible. But if you are interested, they are still posted on this blog. No use taking them down now, but man I wish I was an after instead. I have 6 months to get in the best shape of my life. I have the rest of my life to keep it that way. I am really confident that this program is different from anything I have done in the past and thus have high hopes that it will allow me to maintain once my goals are met. As I have said before, that is the missing link, and PN promises to do that. Besides that, I have the motivation of winning the contest, which I really think I can do because I have so far to go. Kind of sad, but I could really use the money. Might be out of a job come the end of this month. So here’s to fresh starts and sore muscles! Have a great day to anyone who is out there!